Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Monumental – New Zealand's 500 First World War memorials

There were so many people who wanted to remember the 18,000 New Zealanders who died in the

First World War. Nearly all of them were buried overseas.

Where their graves was, was not known. War memorials were a sort of a surrogate tomb

The moment you start looking at them you get hooked, because almost all of them have something

distinctive…it might be in the inscription, it might be in the way some of them were sculpted

Once you start to look at them closely they become fascinating.

There has never been so many public works of art as in the memorials after the First World War.

This was the largest act of cultural patronage that this society as ever seen.